For Maëlle Ricker, winning Olympic gold in front of a screaming Canadian crowd on the mountain 20 minutes from her childhood home was “like a crazy dream.”

For the uninitiated, her sport looked a little wild, too.

By the time the ladies snowboard cross competition was over yesterday, several women had burst through a mesh fence, two heavy favourites – including Canada’s Dominique Maltais – had crashed out of the finals, and one unfortunate Swiss rider limped off with a bloody lip.

Ms. Ricker’s winning run, which she led from start to finish, showed just how good Canadians are at hurtling themselves over jumps and banked curves at break-neck speed.

She added a gold to a cluster of medals snagged on Cypress Mountain in recent days, including her snowboard cross teammate Mike Robertson of Canmore, and a gold and silver from moguls skiers Jenn Heil and Alexandre Bilodeau. In ski cross, a cousin of snowboard cross in which four racers battle down a course trying to be first to the bottom, Canada is a powerhouse.

Aside from moguls, these relatively new Olympics sports – along with the halfpipe snowboard events that begin with the men’s competition today – have introduced a Nascar element to the Olympic Games that’s more familiar to an X Games enthusiast.

And the athletes involved are often as wild off the snow as they are on it.

Unlike figure skaters or lugers, these competitors wouldn’t stoop to wear spandex even on Halloween.

The biggest names, like halfpipe sensation Shaun White, are brands unto themselves, earning millions in video game, clothing, and Red Bull contracts by selling teenagers on how to be cool.

They use words like “whack” and have nicknames like “Animal.” At official press conferences, they hawk charity items like Sweetcheeks panties.

But if fist bumps or racing to Jay-Z tunes sound like a too-casual way compete as an Olympian, that notion should come to a crashing end by the time these Games are over.

These are fierce competitors with training regimens as rigid any downhill racer. And no-one is a better example of that dichotomy than 32-year-old Ms. Ricker.

Bubbly and tanned, she is a self-described “B.C. girl” and one of the pioneers of snowboard cross. She grew up in West Vancouver with her parents, Karl Ricker, now a retired geologist, and Nancy Ricker, now a retired biology professor from Capilano University.

She learned to snowboard fast by chasing her older brother, Jörli, down Whistler Mountain, where her family had a cabin.

In the 1990s, she became a pioneer of a the sport called boarder cross, where racers race four-at-a-time down snow trying to be the first one to reach the bottom – and often don’t. Ms. Ricker entered her first Olympics as a halfpipe rider in 1998.

She narrowly missed Salt Lake in 2002, and had had six knee surgeries before she went to the 2006 games in Turin, the year her sport made its Olympic debut. There, she crashed so hard in the final that she was air lifted off the course in a coma.

“Turin was such a motivator for me,” she said. “It just made me work that much harder. It really, really helped me to get to the podium today.”

She lives in Squamish, B.C., but trains at an elite gym with a work ethic that her training partner and teammate, Rob Fagan, as well as her coach, Tim Milne, say is punishing.

“Maëlle’s just had an incredible year,” Mr. Milne has said. “She trained her ass off in the gym. Nobody would ever understand the time she’s put in. Like, way beyond what snowboarding’s ever seen.”

Yesterday, after a long morning of qualification runs under heavy fog that saw crashes and mishaps from more than a dozen competitors, including Ms. Ricker’s long-time rival and Olympic silver medalist Lindsey Jacobellis of the United States – the sun broke through the clouds.

In the final heat, Ms. Ricker crouched in the start gate. “I was really thinking about what I had to do on my board, all the way down the course,” she said.

When she stood, she pumped her arms in the air, revving up a crowd that she wasn’t able to see from the top of the course, but could hear.

When she flew over the final jump, Canadians held their breath, knowing that earlier in the day riders had caught edges and fallen so close to the end.

“I almost had a heart attack,” Mr. Fagen said.

“It was really stressful in the qualifying, watching her fall in the first run. Going through the finals I didn’t get any sense of relief,” her brother, Jörli, said after the race.

Later, with the Canadian flag draped across her shoulders, Ms. Ricker had a different description of the race.

“It was so, so fun,” she said.